I made a mistake in assuming the Courtauld Gallery's Michelangelo exhibition would be a quiet event. In fact, it is both sensational and beautiful in resurrecting Michelangelo's love for Tommaso de' Cavalieri through the "presentation drawings" he gave the young nobleman as love gifts.

Good for its curator, Dr Stephanie Buck, who has got her hands on formidable drawings from the Royal Collection and elsewhere to create a really singing show. And good for the Courtauld, for blowing away some of the cobwebs that have gathered on the image of this most accessible of all great artists.

Perhaps art history is coming to its senses, and learning to tell stories that bring great art to life. If so, it is finally catching up with historians, paleontologists and physicists who in the last 30 years have remade their subjects in the public eye.

At just the same time that Simon Schama was calling on art to help bring social history to life, art historians were disappearing up a dark theoretical hole. They were rejecting the kind of old-school art history epitomised by EH Gombrich or Kenneth Clark and instead modelling themselves on post-structuralisms of various varieties. The "new art history" is no longer new. But it still seems to result in books that don't quite work as either history or criticism.

Sometimes they're all right. But often in reading the old art historians – for example Panofsky – I am struck not so much by scholarship that may or may not have stood the test of time, but a strong, humane insight into an artist. If you go to the Courtauld show, for instance, it is still worth reading Panofsky's essay on Michelangelo and Neoplatonism, just for the intensity of its feeling for this artist.

What bugs me in too many modern art history books is their lack of passion. The Courtauld's latest exhibition is one that should fire students at the Courtauld Institute to tell stories, engage readers and inspire new generations with the thrill of great art.